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Easy Guide to Free Images (for Erotica Authors)
Hi all,
It's Arti, again at it. I have been asked where authors can find free quality pictures, to use for their stories. As I think this is a question many have, I'm happy to try to help you with that one.
When writing this blog post I was a bit indecisive, about what information to include and what to leave out on purpose. Now you will ask, rightly so, if it's not better to include all information available. Well, maybe in this case not. Please let me try to explain.
Copyright laws, are made for (and probably by) fastidious people (no offence, dear fastidious people ;) ). Now, if you are ignorant by heart, like I am (I know you aren't), than it's better to avoid pitfalls as much as possible and to dance not exactly on the fire spitting vulcano, but on the mowed meadow, even if it's less fun.
That's why I'm making it very easy for you (and me) in this blog post, by only writing about one kind of license that you can use – the gold standard for a freeloader like me (again, I know you aren't one), the license that allows you to do anything, for free.
That being said, there are a number of other copyright licenses that allow you to use images for free, but they come with all kinds of strings attached, and it's pretty easy to get confused – not good for a simple guy like me who's modus operandi that is, most of the time. Again, this being said, should there be serious interest (praise be to the comment section), I will write up a more detailed post about other copyright licenses.
Let's now look at the ultimate and highly regarded license that indicate that there are no strings attached and that you can use a picture for basically anything: CC0
CC0 stands for Creative Commons Zero. It means that you are allowed to do whatever you want with the image, change it in any way you want, use it where ever you want and all of that even without having to name the creator (even though that's a nice thing to do). You can even use CC0 images for commercial projects (but you should do some additional research, before you do that). If you want to learn more, at Creative Commons you can (link).
After having established that, what is the drawback? The drawback is, that the number of images is rather limited and you might have seen before some of the images in the links, that I list below, precisely because they are completely (hassle) free and thus very popular with many bloggers/authors/others and even professional, money making, websites. Noveltrove might not be the most professional website and isn't making any money, as of yet, but if you take a look at my previous blog posts, the images you see there are CC0 as well.
Before I come to the reason why you read this blog post, sources for CC0 images, for the sake of completeness, I'll explain how I attribute the source of an image. Obviously there is no standard way to format the attribution, in other words, you can do as you please.
That's how it looks like:
Image by [Creator] [Comment], [License] -> Example: Image by Jane Doe (Edited by John Doe), CC0
Now the list you were waiting for, websites where you can find CC0 images:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CC-Zero
flickr.com/creativecommons/cc0-1.0
gratisography.com
pdpics.com
pexels.com (Favorite)
pickupimage.com
pixabay.com (Favorite)
publicdomainpictures.net
splitshire.com
unsplash.com
Because I know you are all highly cultured people, a link to The New York Public Library (but not all images are CC0).
Just one more thing, please always double-check if an image in question is really CC0. Some sources link out to other websites where images are for sale, so have a look if it really says CC0 in the description.
Please add your sources of copyright free pictures in the comments below.
Thank you and I hope this post was useful to you!
Image by Stokpic, CC0